Between September 22 and 28, the nation’s library community once again “celebrates” Banned Books Week, an annual event established in 1982 by the American Library Association (ALA) to profile acts of censorship and book banning in schools and libraries across the nation. Beginning with a “Library Bill of Rights” (LBR) that ALA adopted in 1939, library leaders worked hard during the 20th century to hone a national image as defenders of intellectual freedom, opponents of censorship, and proponents of the freedom to read. Sponsoring a Banned Books Week was yet another way to reinforce that image.

But between 1939 and 1982 that image evolved to become an information silo of librarianship’s own making, one that was silent on or indifferent to issues of race and libraries. For example, shortly after the Des Moines Public Library, IA, adopted a forerunner of the LBR that ALA later used as a template, local pressure forced the library to remove a mural showing Native Americans being driven from their homes by white soldiers and citizens. The library press said nothing. Three months after ALA passed the LBR, five African American teenagers conducted an ultimately unsuccessful sit-in to desegregate the Alexandria Public Library, VA. Although racially segregated public libraries violated several LBR principles, the library press and ALA said nothing. When the Supreme Court handed down its Brown v. Board of Education decision in 1954 that affected thousands of public school libraries and hundreds of thousands of school librarians and students, the library press, ALA, all of its divisions, and all state library associations wrote no editorials, hosted no conference programs, and issued no statements addressing the decision.

When African American Autherine Lucy enrolled as a library science student at the all-white University of Alabama in 1956, her presence led to campus riots. During one of the riots she hid in her Children’s Literature classroom. Her plight brought national attention, and Thurgood Marshall flew to Alabama to defend her. Ultimately, however, the university expelled her. The library press, ALA, all of its divisions, and all state library associations said nothing about these events. When rural Mississippi African American high school librarian Ernestine Denham Talbert unsuccessfully attempted to register to vote in 1962, her white county school superintendent refused to renew her contract. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy immediately initiated a Department of Justice suit against her school district. Like Lucy’s plight, Talbert’s case—which ultimately was unsuccessful—drew national attention. Yet the library press, ALA, all of its divisions, and all state library associations said and did nothing.

Because these incidents were greeted with silence by librarianship’s media and professional associations between 1939 and 1982, these events never entered the profession’s discourse or took up residence in its collective memory. Part of the reason for this absence can be traced to the tone of librarianship’s professional discourse. “In general, youth services librarians did not confront directly or antagonize unnecessarily, but instead sought a path around possible obstacles,” Christine Jenkins argues in her 1995 University of Wisconsin–Madison dissertation on youth service librarians between 1939 and 1955. “Their words were often mild, deferential, agreeable, optimistic, and relentlessly positive,” she observes. As a result, the profession’s tone during this period actually functioned as an obstacle to even introducing controversial subjects like racial segregation into librarianship’s public conversations.

Ironically, this very silence also helped librarianship reinforce its rhetoric about “library neutrality,” a myth many still think marks past practice. For example, in a February 24, 2022 New York Times op-ed entitled “The Battle for the Soul of the Library,” Stanley Kurtz criticizes the work of contemporary “woke librarians” and calls instead for “recapturing” a “library neutrality” he believes characterizes the profession’s past. He’s wrong about that.

Within the library profession, the impact of living in this information silo shows up in other ways. When the nation began debating the use of Critical Race Theory in schools and colleges, for example, the ALA Executive Board issued a statement on August 18, 2021, that concluded: “For more than 140 years, ALA has been the trusted voice of libraries advocating for the profession and the library’s role in enhancing learning and ensuring access to information for all.”

But the statement is historically inaccurate. Because I have been researching and writing American library history for more than a half-century, I’ve come to believe it is impossible for members of the nation’s library community to accurately reflect on their profession’s traditions if such large chunks of the past remain unknown to the present. Reading the 2021 ALA statement, I felt compelled to write a letter to the editor of ALA’s major magazine, American Libraries, describing the historical inaccuracies. (“Whitewashing History,” American Libraries 51 [November/December, 2021: 6]).

But ALA has continued to repeat the same statement in press release after press release. Bad enough, but other institutions and associations have now begun parroting the statement that seems to have taken on a life of its own. For example, the New York Public Library requoted it in a January 4 press release; the Association for Rural and Small Libraries did the same on February 7. The fact that this historically inaccurate statement can so easily echo through the nation’s library community is made possible only because librarianship continues to exist in an information silo that is indifferent to or unfamiliar with major parts of its own professional history.

On September 16, 2024, the University Press of Mississippi (UPM) released my book, In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries. It shows that all the while the nation’s library community was building its national image as a defender of intellectual freedom, proponent of the freedom to read, and opponent of censorship between 1954 and 1974, it was silent and indifferent to the racism and humiliations experienced in the Jim Crow South by Black public school librarians, their students, services, and collections. Except for Pat Schuman’s brief 1971 School Library Journal article about the displacement of southern Black school librarians that the rest of the profession seems to have ignored (“Southern Integration: Writing Off the Black Librarian,” School Library Journal 17 [May, 1971]: 37-39), In Silence or Indifference narrates a story never before told.

Much of the research for the book came out of another research project funded by a 2017 Library of Congress John W. Kluge Center fellowship that was later published as American Public School Library Librarianship: A History (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2021). The book is the first comprehensive and evaluative historical account of the largest sector of the library profession. My research brought me to several controversial conclusions (including some about race and school librarianship).

In 2025 the American Association of School Librarians will commemorate its 75th anniversary. A year later ALA and Library Journal will commemorate their 150th. If librarianship’s organizations, institutions, media, and professional associations do not break out of their information silo, if they do not shine some light on the profession’s darkest places, the celebrations they are now planning will turn into the same kinds of “happy history” nostalgia events that have marked so many of its previous anniversaries. As a result, librarianship will learn nothing from them and a profession populated with self-professed “information specialists” will continue to blindly pass on historical misinformation.

In response to challenges to critical race theory in late 2020, the following meme made the rounds of social media—including school library social media, where I picked it up:

• Studying history will sometimes disturb you.
• Studying history will sometimes upset you.
• Studying history will sometimes make you furious.
• If studying history always makes you feel proud and happy, you probably aren’t studying history.

It’s long past time for professional librarianship to recognize this.

Wayne A. Wiegand is F. William Summers Professor Emeritus of Library and Information Studies at Florida State University, and author of Irrepressible Reformer: A Biography of Melvil Dewey (1998), Main Street Public Library: Community Places and Reading Spaces in the Rural Heartland, 1876-1956 (2011), and Part of Our Lives: A People’s History of the American Public Library (2015). And with his wife Shirley A. Wiegand, he is coauthor of The Desegregation of Public Libraries in the Jim Crow South: Civil Rights and Local Activism (2018).